Voices: Rhonda Vincent

Good Thing Going,the title cut of Rhonda Vincent's latest album, had its start, as many good songs do, in a conversation. The bluegrass musician was on the road, getting ready for a gig in Oregon, her first gig of a new season of touring. "My husband called, and we started talking about our life, how thankful we were -- although it has not always been easy -- and that through it all, we had a good thing going," she says. Vincent hung up the phone and thought, "That could be a good title for a song..." and soon enough, she wrote one. "It's mostly true to life," she says, "though there's a little bit of it that's made up. I'll leave it up to you to figure out which is which!"

There are five songs which Vincent wrote on Good Thing Going, the most of her own writing she has so far put on one album, and that's an aspect of her music she's grown into in recent years. She grew into singing, and playing, and being on stage, too -- starting at age three. It's a family tradition. "It wasn't like music was a choice -- it was a way of life," she said. "Music has been traced back at least five generations in the Vincent family, so it was something they were doing long before I was ever thought of. When you're born a Vincent, you're going to play and you're going to sing." Vincent is from a rural area in Missouri. "Every day when I got home from school, my father and grandfather were waiting, and we'd sing 'til dinner. After dinner other friends came around and we literally played every night of my life while I was growing up," she recalls. Though she did sometimes miss taking part in school activities when she got to her teenage years, "music was so important to me -- it really was a way of life. School was just something I did, I had to do, but I'd think okay, now that's over for the day and I can run home and get to the music," she says.

She's always been a singer, and at first she played drums in the family band, but when they were hired for a regular television show gig. the show already had a drummer, and the way the pay scale worked, if Vincent just sang without playing an instrument she wouldn't get paid. "So my dad said, 'here's the mandolin, here's G, C and D, and next week you're playing this instrument for two and a half hours.' Even though I only knew three chords!" Vincent recalled, laughing. As her dad may have suspected, she soon fell in love with the instrument, which remains her favorite still, though she also can play "pretty much anything with strings."

Well respected as lead singer of The Salley Mountain Show family band, as she came into her twenties Vincent wanted to begin a solo career too. She won several episodes of a Nashville television music contest, and the show''s host, country star Jim Ed Brown, hired her to tour in his back up band, playing fiddle. This brought her to the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, which was exciting enough in itself. "Playing the Opry was, and still is, one of the highlights of my career," she says, and she laughs at herself as she recalls that on that first appearance, Brown unexpectedly asked to her to sing a solo. She made it through the piece despite feeling so overwhelmed by the experience that she was sure her knees were knocking so much she was going to fall over.

That's a funny memory for a woman who today radiates her joy in music from the stage as well as when she's just talking about it quiet conversation. It took her a while to find her place and her touchstone, though. There were three albums with independent label Rebel Records, and then two albums with a Nashville label during a run at a mainstream country career in the early 1990s. That turned out to be not the right time or place for her music. "One regime would go out, and another would come in, and it would be, oh great, you play an instrument, you need to be playin' all those instruments and showin' this off on stage. Then another would come in and say lose the instruments, grab that microphone. It was very confusing, trying to adapt who I am to what they wanted me to be." But Vincent points out "that was a great learning experience for me. I learned things about producing, using mics, techniques in the studio -- but I did not enjoy it. I do think it was part of the transition for me in taking this from a family tradition to a career. But was a hard thing for me."

So hard, in fact, that it made her consider whether she wanted to continue in music at all. Despite offers to to move to Nashville, she and her husband had decided to stay based in Missouri, and there Vincent put together a band of bluegrass friends and booked a few dates while thinking over what she wanted to do. Those gigs showed her. "I had been away from the bluegrass scene for about five years," she said, "and I wasn't sure how they'd take me, you know. Sometimes they think you're a traitor if you go off and do country music. But I was so welcomed -- and I was back playing my instrument, playing and signing from my heart. It came so naturally and I found I was having fun."

It has been fun, and it has been hard work, and it has been, and continues to be, just what Vincent wants to be doing. She books more than one hundred dates a year, and is part of the regular summer bluegrass series at the Ryman in Nashville. She's seven times been honored as female vocalist of the year by the International Bluegrass Music Association, and she's found a home for her music at Rounder Records; Good Thing Going is her seventh CD release with them and she has a DVD out as well. Recently she taped an appearance with folk and cowboy music icon Ian Tyson, which will air on television in Canada. And about that country music career? She just may have the best of both worlds. Her latest video from Good Thing Going, the heartfelt and wise song I Gotta Start Somewhere, is high on the charts at CMT, and country mega star Keith Urban joins Vincent on Good Thing Going for a thoughtful version of the folk song The Water Is Wide.

"I was talking to a friend a few years ago, she hadn't seen me in a while, and in fact her husband had played with our band awhile when I was about five, I think," Vincent reflects. "She said, ''I watched you grow up with that, playing every day, and I thought that when you grew older you'd hate it.' Instead, I grew to love it. I can't imagine ever wanting to do anything else." And if you'd like to hear her talk about why through a song, check out the closing cut on Good Thing Going, Bluegrass Saturday Night.

for a review of Good Thing Going look here

You'll find music content from many genres and plenty of other music fans at Gather Essentials: Music. For more of Kerry Dexter's Voices columns, look here. It's published on Thursdays.

Kerry Dexter, Music Correspondent Kerry's credits include VH1, CMT, the folk music magazine Dirty Linen, Strings, The Encyclopedia of Ireland and the Americas, and The MusicHound Guides. She also writes about the arts and creative practice at Music Road and contributes to Fred Bals' Series of Tubes.